 Be Careful What You Wish For
Sometimes we get to the end of a week, and our staff has to laugh about how everything played out that week, in positive yet unexpected ways. Of course, we're talking primarily about President Obama's "fix" to the Affordable Care Act, which he announced at a press conference on Thursday.
The way everyone in the media seems to refer to the latest tweak to Obamacare as a "fix" led us to think of an old phrase we've mentioned here previously, that many of our readers think of as Nebraska's unofficial motto. That motto is simple: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it IS broke, fix it - just once."
That "fix" that President Obama announced on Thursday seems to fall into the category of things that need to be fixed once and fixed right - even though, as Jamelle Bouie noted Thursday afternoon, Obamacare wasn't really broken. Still, as the President contritely admitted Thursday afternoon, many critics of Obamacare were angry they couldn't keep their plans and both he and Congressional Democrats felt like they were about to be pummeled by the problems in the rollout of Obamacare.
Of course, as we noted yesterday, having a plan beats having no plan almost every time, even if that plan needs to be tweaked from time to time.
In short, the tweak or "fix" President Obama instituted isn't a legislative repair, but an administrative move, one that gives health insurance companies nationwide the flexibility to extend current insurance plans for one year. That extension applies especially to those insurance plans that don't currently meet the new higher minimum quality standards of the ACA.
The single "catch" to the President's fix is...
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